She was angry. No one had told her to be, not in so many words, but she felt the rush of indignation, heard her voice tremble when she told the man to keep his explanations to himself. She had asked him a simple question, made a simple request, and he had refused her. That is all she needed to know and all she wanted to hear from him. His song and dance about inadequate staff and poor equipment, his complaints about having to put up with endless hassles—none of this seemed to her to have anything to do with her. She had asked him—a flunkey in the college’s audiovisual department—to arrange for her a private screening of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, a film she was supposed to have seen with her class on Monday night, when she was just too tired to go out.

Now the charmless little man had turned her down, said it was impossible, and she was required to listen to him justify himself to her. He had stringy, probably unwashed red hair and an ugly little pointed beard. He wore, beneath a v-neck sweater, a button-down white shirt and an impeccably knotted silk necktie which she thought pretentious and ridiculous. He called her “Miss” and she thought the best thing she could do for him was to tell him to keep his reasons to himself. But she let him go on and finally said only that she didn’t like the tone of his voice and did he know that he was rude? For a moment she liked the nervous shifting of his beady eyes after that, the way he sort of retreated, asked her to let him apologize for his rudeness—though he had not intended to be rude—but then almost at once she felt again the surge of raw anger and asked him to write for her his name and his extension number. Nor did she explain to him why she needed his name, or agree to let him apologize. When she grabbed the ragged scrap of paper from his twitchy hands she told him only that he should be more careful, jack, and that he’d be hearing from her. He didn’t seem happy.

She had been feeling angry all week. Her roommate Sulema had told her she had a scowl on her face, and once or twice in class the other day she had heard herself raise her voice when she disagreed with something her history teacher had said. But the encounter with the guy at audiovisual had left her feeling even more agitated than usual. She walked out of the building and moved quickly across the green, failing to acknowledge the wave of a suite mate, not quite knowing what she was going to do. Someone has got to talk to that boy, she repeated to herself as she entered the college center and went down the stairs to the office of minority affairs. The walls in the corridor were as always plastered with notices announcing multicultural dinners, dances and discussions. Grievance meetings were scheduled on Wednesdays at 7. A specialist in English as a second language would be on campus every Monday. A fund-raiser for a new multicultural resource center was planned for late November.

She hated all this multicultural bullshit. They were building their own little world, she thought, and she was supposed to be grateful. More than once in the past she had wanted to tear down every one of these notices, to sit in one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs at the far end of the corridor and look at the expressions on the faces of the brothers and sisters when they arrived for work in the morning and saw the clean white walls, stripped of all that irrelevance. You’d have to be more than a little brain-washed, she thought, to buy into this stuff, into this pathetic little world with its Afro-American pride and its Latino heritage and its Asian-American feel-good fantasies. She had come down here not, she assured herself, because she had anything but contempt for all of this, but because she had a simple question to ask. If a sister could give her an answer, she’d just say thank you very much and depart. She wouldn’t need to do more than that.…

 
Ontario Review #60